Google Analytics

Google Analytic is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.

Google Analyic measure:

Pageview:

A pageview is recorded every time a page is viewed. every time the trackpageview method is executed in the script.  When a visitor hits the back button, a page view is generated.  when a visitor hits refresh, a pageview is created.  every time a page is opened in the browser, regardless of whether it has been cached, it generates a pageview

Visit:

Google Analytics focuses on visits.  this is simply a series of pageviews that a single visitor makes at a time. A visit ends after the visitor either closes the browser or is inactive for 30 minutes

 

Total Visitors:

 Google Analytics emphasizes visits over visitors because of the inherent inaccuracies of trying to track individual users

 

Bounce:

A visit with one pageview. It doesn't matter how long the visitor was on the page or how they left. Technically, it's a visit with only one interaction. Any Event Tracking calls would negate this. Generally speaking, it's just a one-page visit, though.

 

Time on Page:

Time on page is measured by subtracting the time a visitor hit a page from the time they hit the next page

 

Time on Site:

This is the sum of all times on page for a visit. Or, more accurately, it is the difference between the time they viewed the first and last pages in a visit. Note that viewing pages in different tabs doesn't affect this. Google Analytics simply sees a string of pages being viewed in chronological order, without any reference to multiple tabs or windows

 

New Visitor

A visitor who did not have Google Analytics cookies when they hit the first page in this visit. Should the visitor delete their cookies and come back to the site, they would be counted as a new visitor.

 

Returning Visitor

A visitor with existing Google Analytics cookies. Those cookies typically will also record the number of visits the visitor has made to the site.

 

Pages/Visit:

Pageviews divided by visitors.

 

Direct Traffic:

Ideally, this is the traffic that came to a site via bookmarks or by directly typing in the URL. In reality, it is the traffic for which the code couldn't determine a source. Depending on the site and the browser, some links may not show a referrer and instead would be categories as direct.  

 

Referring Sites::

This is traffic for which (1) a referrer was identified, (2) the referrer is not a search engine and (3) there are no campaign variables. This should only represent free traffic, friendly referrals to a site. If campaign variables are used, no paid traffic should be attributed toward referrals.

 

Search Engine Traffic:

Google Analytics automatically categorizes traffic as coming from a search engine if the referring URL is from its list of known search engines and there is a search term identified in that URL. Both organic and paid search engine traffic is put into this group.